Waging war and linking allies in Agarest Senki

Agarest Senki (aka Record of Agarest War) gained notoriety because of its soul breed system where you date and mate with female party members to create the protagonist for the next chapter. It reminded me of the system Sega introduced in Phantasy Star III, only more CERO C (teen equivalent). I don’t want to rehash what was said about the dating elements because there is more to Agarest Senki than wooing in the middle of a war. There is a war that Leonheart has to fight!

During battle Agarest Senki functions differently from other strategy RPGs. Players move all of their characters on the small chess-like battlefield in one round. Then all of the enemies move. After all the new positions are picked the move phase ends and all fighters walk to their new square. It’s a strategic twist because you will have no idea if your characters will be in range to attack or not until after the move phase ends. Fortunately, Leonheart and his harem party usually have attacks with a radius of a few squares. As long as you spread your army out you can probably hit something, but maybe not with one of Leonheart’s skills if he is physically out of range. There is a trick to the system, characters are linked together by glowing extend area links. Leonheart may be out of range to hit a dragon, but as long as one of his linked allies is he can hit the dragon. The linking system also allows characters to do combo attacks as long as they have action points (AP). You can continue to link attacks as long as characters have remaining AP. This gives players the option to completely drain the AP of a few characters to eliminate a powerful enemy or to share AP costs between characters.

As a freshman SRPG attempt Compile Heart came up with some creative ideas for combat. Unfortunately, Agarest Senki hasn’t been picked up by a US publisher and the chessboard-like PlayStation 3 system remains in Japan. However, the curious can give it a go by picking up the free demo sitting on Japan's PlayStation Store.

I gave this game a try and boy, was it confusing. I sort of figured out what you’re talking about and it made some sense, but it still felt weird. All new things do, I suppose. Any guesses on a publisher to pick it up, if any? NIS? Atlus? XSeed? They’re my three guesses, if at all. =D

I would guess the same three, with NIS being the prime choice since the title is tied to Idea Factory. Conspiracy Entertainment might be a long shot since they have a relationship with Compile Heart too.

LuminousAtelier

Oh yeah I was thinking ether Atlus or NIS would get it too,I’ve seen the trailer and it looked interesting to me I hope we get to see this game,dunno if I will like it but it looks awsome.-^_^-

Hello Hello

Looks interesting. Too bad it’s a PS3 game.

Aoshi00

I tried the demo, but couldn’t really get into it, maybe it was the very simple graphics? The mogshots look nice of course like Growlancer. What I found weird was you’re always transported to a rising arena platform once battle commences, even if you encounter an ememy in a forest, what gives? Is it just lazy or they actually fight in another dimension? Even Jeanne D’arc looks a lot nicer.. Sry if I sound like a graphic whore here, but for a PS3 SRPG, it looks too plain for my taste.

SomeDude

The game’s combat just looks too boring.

You go out to the same platform to fight every friggin’ time. The animations and effects are straight off the PS2. It’s just sad that the two SRPGs that Idea Factory made for the PS3 are the crappiest ones they’ve made, IMO. (Mist of Chaos is widely regarded in Japan as the worst PS3 title, bar none.)

They need to hunker down with all this cash they’re getting from the US, and bring a game into the new millennium. I like their big cut-away graphics, but they need to fully animate them. They need to build a new SRPG engine that allows for the wide variety of characters they have to actually be different and useful in battle.

Right now they’re just going through the motions, like a non-budget Simple 2000 company.

Video game stories from other sites on the web. These links leave Siliconera.